Custom network editor

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Sorry for the long post, it’s kinda hard to descibe. Wish I could attach a real [coffee] for you

I basically have a network-hierarchy, consisting of 4 levels and all levels can be expanded (shown at the same time). Malcolm, you can look at the screenshot in “meeting of minds”, the red, green, pink and blue dots is what im talking about.

So basically it looks like this:
/L1/node0
/L1/node0/L2/node0
/L1/node0/L2/node0/L3/node0
/L1/node0/L2/node0/L3/node0/L4/node0
/L1/node0/L2/node0/L3/node0/L4/node1
/L1/node1/L2/node0
…

obviously transforming “/L1/node0/L2/node0” will also need to move all children, … Rendering this the traditional way, the parent xforms will be applied to the children automatically. But when instancing, this won’t happen automatically.

To fix this I can object-merge all of my nodes (using a single point in each) and convert that to CHOPs for instancing. That’s probably way slow when moving nodes around as the object merge will recook all the time.

Or I put a CHOP with all the parent xforms applied into each node and then multiselect those. Could be faster, but for many nodes probaly also slow.

Is there maybe a shader solution, i.e. offset some instances according to other instances (their “parents”)? Guess even if possible, this is gonna be way over my head, but hopefully I’m wrong.

[/coffee]

2

I’ve found an issue with instancing when using nested object transforms, if the transforms include a rotation. Also there is an issue with rendering primitive types (sphere primitives etc.) with instancing. The transform order is done incorrectly in those cases.

If you are simply using translations though, the nested transforms should work, can you send me an example.

3

I think you missunderstood. I don’t have an instance in
/geo1
and another instance in
/geo1/geo2
…

Instead I have a single instance at / and just object-merge points from the nested geo COMPs to get the data for the individual instance placements. But it’s very slow if I have hundrets of GEOs to object-merge.

I might have to revert to a nested-instance approach, as I’m not sure the one-instance-for-everything approach will be able to effectively support everything the network editor needs.

If you have the time to look at it, I’d gladly prepare a simple example file of what the network editor is supposed to do, so that you might be able to tell me the best approach.

thanks